Mushroom Town Part 3

"He com' to fetch a pair o' boots to mend."

"Ay."

"Think ye----" again the look as of p.r.i.c.kers, "--think ye there wor owt?"

"How, owt?"

"'At he wanted to know what time it wor, or owt?"

"There wor t' clock."

"Ay...."

There were minutes of silence this time. Evidently the younger brother occupied them by taking, in thought, a considerable journey. He spoke as if in objection to some far-fetched surmise.

"But they'd ha' to be set forrard again," he grunted.

"Ay, I'm bothered wi' that," the elder admitted, "--wi'out t' Missis herself----"

"Aw!... Think ye?..."

They knocked for two more cups of tea.

"And we've been swearing to ten o'clock."

"So ye think there wor summat?"

"I cannot think t' lad wor telling 'em lies," said the alder-buyer.

This time they both peered reflectively at the auction announcement on the wall, smoking and spitting as they peered.

V.

THE HAFOD UNOS.

"Then," said Terry's Syndicate, or such of its members as lounged in Terry's office, looking down on the Lime Street and St. George's Hall pavements as if they had been so many fishermen selecting a likely spot for the casting of a fly, "what about going back to the old idea--coal?"

"Hm!----" (a very dubious "Hm!").--"Far better have another shot at manganese--especially after what's happened----"

What had happened had started remotely enough from Llanyglo. It had started, to be exact, in the Balkans. Much manganese comes from the Balkans; a war there had suddenly made the supply a mere trickle, so that prices had whooped up; and--wonder of wonders--those old workings of Squire Wynne's, farther along the coast, actually looked like paying. Terry's Company, unhappily, had just transferred its rights, and was rather sore about it.

"Wouldn't that be a little too--timely?" a timid member suggested.

"Not if you--er--put it properly. It's only thirty miles away----" The speaker paused from delicacy. "From the real manganese" was understood.

"Might send a geologist down--one we could trust----"

A very young member of the Syndicate hazarded a remark.--"But wouldn't burnt mine-works come dearer than burnt fences?"

They smiled indulgently at him. He was merely suffering from a slight confusion of ideas. n.o.body had said anything about mine-works. Then they turned to Terry.

"What do you say, Armfield?" ...

It was now winter, and the dispute was still dragging on. There had been no further fence-burning, but the Member for the const.i.tuency had been memorialised, a joint meeting had been held in the Llanyglo schoolroom, and he had promised to come down and see for himself how matters stood. Until he should do so the disputants glared, so to speak, at one another. A certain element of contempt, that looked at first like tolerance, had even entered into the quarrel. Thus, a section of fence on a portion of the sandhills that it would have been a positive inconvenience to visit was allowed to stand. Llanyglo preferred to reserve its strength. But elsewhere the stakes lay half buried in the sand, and John Willie Garden now and then wondered what sort of a raft they would make.

"The whole thing looks like being a d.a.m.ned bad spec," the Syndicate grumbled.

That opinion seemed to be gaming strength.

There seemed to be more than a chance that Llanyglo, its heathery Trwyn and its purple mountains, its unproductive sandhills and its non dividend-paying sea, would be written off by Terry's Syndicate as a total loss.

Then, all in a night, something astonishing happened at Llanyglo.

The words "all in a night" are to be understood in their very plainest sense. Granted that it was a winter's night, and therefore a long one, with the darkness setting in soon after four and the sun not coming up behind the mountains again until nearly eight; none the less the fact remained that Llanyglo went to bed as usual, and woke up to rub its eyes, unable to believe what it so plainly saw. What had happened was this: With Edward Garden's house-roof still a toast-rack against the wintry sky, and his slates just as they had been left after Eesaac Oliver's last long-division sum, and only half the staircase yet fitted, and the little socket John Willie had scooped out under the date-stone still awaiting its sixpence--with all this arrested as life and growth and motion were arrested in the Enchanted Palace, the first new house had gone up in Llanyglo. Where had been nothing the night before, there it now was, staring at them when the sun rose, a house, with smoke coming out of its chimney.

That same friend of Squire Wynne's who repeated to the author of the Sixpenny Guide the Squire's remark about invasion via the Mersey, told him also what a Welsh "Hafod Unos" is.

"You know what the words mean," he said. "Strictly speaking, it's the summer-house--pavilion--shelter--of a night. The essentials are that it must be built on common land, and in a single night. Then they can't eject you. At least that's the idea. Don't ask me how it stands in Law. It may be a kind of squatter's right, or anything else, or it may have no standing at all. Probably it hasn't. But that's neither here nor there. They have their notions about it, and those at any rate are immemorial. Look here: you're pottering about this country just now; just count how many houses you find with the name 'Hafod Unos.' You'll find quite a lot. There's a very big one Bangor way, that probably took some years to build, but probably one of these places was its foundation.... And a house 'within the meaning of the Act,' so to speak, means that smoke must have gone up the chimney. Cook your breakfast there, and--well, after that you're a sort of tolerated freeholder. It might be worth putting into your Guide Book. You'd better add a footnote, though, that the 'f' in 'hafod' is a 'v,' and 'unos' is p.r.o.nounced 'innos.' ... Not at all; you're welcome to any help I can give you----"

Llanyglo, snugly in bed, had heard the sounds across the sandhills during the night, but they had been set down to the newest development of the fencing dispute. This development was that, a week or so before, several cartloads of undressed stone had been shot down by the side of the sandy gully that ran from Pritchard's gap down to the sh.o.r.e. And Llanyglo had smiled. Aha! They were going to build a walled enclosure, were they? Something that wouldn't burn, whatever? Well, well, if it amused them to build walls on winter nights when everybody else was warm in bed, they might. They would only lose their labour in the end. Mr. Tudor Williams, of Ponteglwys, was going to ask a question in the House of Commons, yes, and he was coming down to speak at the Chapel and to see for himself. It was a cold night for building walls, whatever---- So they stayed in bed, and only the revolving Trwyn light, two reds and a white, saw the planting of the thorn in Llanyglo's side.

The two Kerrs did not do it alone. It took four of them--"a Kerr to each corner," as Howell Gruffydd afterwards said. The two other brothers had been sent for from Ratchet, where one of them worked in an asbestos factory and the other was a builder's labourer; and if these imported ones lacked that spur of conviction that their watches had been tampered with by tricky Welshmen, they had another and a double incentive--the sense of family unity, and of the honour of the gradeliest county on earth, Lancashire. No Kerr, no lad from Lancashire whomsoever, could thole to be bested by a Welshman. Lancashire was the place for which Johnnie Briggs played cricket, the place where the Waterloo Cup Meeting was held. They danced in clogs there, clogs with soles of Welsh alder, and laaked at quoits and knurr and spell, and knew a bit about homing pigeons, not to speak of c.o.c.ks, the game kind. They were lads, and right, in Lancashire.--Wales? Wales produced nothing but alders and oats and goats and Chapels.

The idea had been that of Ned, the eldest brother, and it was part of the miscellaneous general information he had picked up on his alder-prospecting through Merionethshire and Montgomery and Carnarvon and Denbigh and Flint. He had seen a way of convicting Llanyglo out of its own mouth. They threw down fences on the grounds that the land was common land; very well, if it was common, as they claimed, it was a proper site for a Hafod Unos. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander; and merely as a poke in the eye for watch-tinkering Welshmen, and a vindication of Lancashire's superior wit and malice, it would be worth a night's work to see their faces in the morning.

So to work in the dark the four brothers got.

They helped themselves to a modest slice of Llanyglo earth, plotted it out with stakes and string, and then began to dig. The night was moonless, and they worked by the light of four lanterns. These illumined little enough of the waste; the moving, straddling shadows they cast hardly began before they were lost in the darkness again. Knitting-needles of light came and went again on the polished handles of the rising and falling spades, and faintly, regularly, and as if a spirit pa.s.sed high overhead in the night, the intermittent Trwyn beam swung--red, red, white--red, red, white---- They had not to dig deep; there is much volcanic rock under the Llanyglo sand; and they had not set up fences half a dozen times without having a notion where it was.

"Here we are," Harry, the builder's labourer grunted as his spade gave a clink and a jump in his hand. "I thowt it wadn't be far off.--Is t' barril there, Tommy?"

Across a mound of thrown-up sand one of the lanterns cast a short parabola of shadow. It was the shadow of a nine-gallon barrel of beer.

"Nay, we mun do a bit first," Tommy replied, spitting on his hands and driving in his spade again.

Their house already existed, complete in their practical heads, before ever a spade was lifted. They had seen through its entire anatomy in the taproom of the Station Hotel, with beer to solve all difficulties. Nothing was done twice, and brother did not get in brother's way. Even as Howell Gruffydd said, they took a corner of their plan apiece and dry-walled, all save Tommy, who went to and fro with a hand-cart, fetching stone, not too much at a time, because of the dead softness of the sand. For the general design Ned's word was law; for details, each used his own gumption. They worked and grunted, and worked and grunted, and worked. By the time Sirius appeared over faraway Delyn, and Orion balanced himself on Mynedd Mawr, they had a serviceable first course laid. Then they put on their coats again, for it was a bitter night and they perspired, and with a single blow Tommy neatly tapped the barrel. They drank, threw off their coats again, and set to work once more.

"Never heed that, Sam," Ned said once, seeing his brother elaborating the stark essential plan that had been agreed upon in the taproom of the Station Hotel. "T' corners, t' beams, and t' roof; we haven't time to paint it and put a pot o' geraniums i' t' window."

By one o'clock the lanterns showed four irregular angles of masonry, shoulder-high, as rough as you please, but true by plumb and level. This might be a joke against Llanyglo, but it was a workmanlike one. Only two of the brothers now walled, for they had only two ladders; Sam helped Tom to lift and carry beams.

By three o'clock only two of the beams were laid, but they were the princ.i.p.al ones, and Ned seemed well content.

"That's t' main o' t' work," he said, with satisfaction. "How's t' barril going on, Tom?"

"True by t' level yet," Tom replied. "Shall we start on th' bread and cheese?----"

"Did ye think on to bring some pickled onions?"

"Ay."

"Then we'll ha' we're nooning."

They took their nooning, with Sirius now over Mynedd Mawr, and Orion soaring like a kite. They took it at their leisure; they were "lads from a reight place," setting about a job as if they meant to finish it, not Welshmen matchboarding. A mountain of sand filled the s.p.a.ce within their four corners, and they lay on their backs on it, smoking, and watching the red and white spokes of the light high over their heads, twenty-mile spokes, of a wheel that had no circ.u.mference but its sweep through the night. Now and then Sam gave a low chuckle; but Ned smoked, spat, and was silent, save that he said from time to time, "Did ye number and letter them chamfers, Harry?" or some similar question. You would have said they had a month before them. Certainly the Kerrs, when there was a surprise to be prepared for foreigners who meddled with their watches, were members one of another.

At half-past three they set to work again. By four Ned had climbed up above, and was sitting astride a beam with the light of a lantern shining up on his streaming face.

"Give us another inch, Sam," he grunted, "--a bit more--a bit more--whoa! Tom, that quoin--no, th' one wi' th' bolt--this is th' chimney end--and get them three strutts ready, accordinglie to th' letters.... How are ye down there, Harry?"

The mason brother was building the chimney. It was an outside one, ma.s.sive as a b.u.t.tress, and Harry was building it well and truly, for it was the essential of the house. Smoke must go up it before dawn, the hearth-smoke of civilised man, the lowly and secular and beautiful token that he has made himself an abiding-place on a spot of earth, and becomes part of that spot, and it part of him, so that to deracinate him is to thrust him back again into the b.e.s.t.i.a.l state and to make the land as desert as the sea. By all prognostication, Edward Garden's smoke should have been the first to add itself to that of the cl.u.s.ter of humble dwellings between the mountains and the waves that was Llanyglo; but of that lawn of lightsome blue that veils Llanyglo to-day the breakfast-smoke of the Kerrs was the fore-runner. At half-past four they were shovelling out the mountain of sand and making the hearth for it. By six Tommy had brought in the bundle of dry twigs and f.a.ggots he had carefully hidden away. Harry was filling in the s.p.a.ce between the main beam and the transom of the door; when Tom asked him for a match he sprang down, and Ned and Sam also descended from the roof.

"What time is it?" Tom asked.

Ned gave a glance round, and smiled for the first time that night as he drew out his watch.

"Five past six," he said, and added, with indescribable dryness, "--unless som'b'dy's been meddling wi' my watch."

"Here goes," said Tommy, striking a match....

They exchanged glances that were near to winks as they watched the flames. It was their equivalent of a cheer.

The night paled; the Trwyn light went out; and off the headland a seal disported itself in the icy sea. The day stole across Delyn, but Mynedd Mawr still remained an awful precipice of ink--the shadow of the morning bank lay over him. Then came the first glitter on the waves, and, as if with light all other faculties awake, folk became conscious of the crowing of c.o.c.ks and the falling of the breakers on the sh.o.r.e. Howell Gruffydd got up and began to rekindle his fire. A bolt was shot back at Pritchard's farm. Dafydd Dafis packed his breakfast in his tin and set out for his day's work--a little reslating of the roof of the Baptist Chapel.

But on his way across the sandhills he suddenly changed, not only his direction, but his gait also. He advanced cautiously, skirted certain mounds of sand that he did not remember to have seen before, and then as suddenly drew back. Then, instead of advancing again, he returned by a circuitous route, dropped into a sunken sandy way, and then ran as fast as his legs would carry him down to the cottages. There he thrust his head into Morgan's cottage and said something, and ran to the next one--or rather to the next but two, for Edward Garden's double cottage had been locked up since October. Then Howell Gruffydd came to his shop door, and Dafydd called him.

Five minutes later half Llanyglo was out on the sandhills staring through a gap at something that lay beyond.

It was an extraordinary house they saw, and then went round to the back to look at from another point of view. It appeared to consist of a living-room and a scullery, with a patch under the skeleton of a sort of penthouse at the back. It was not even on the land that had been fenced and unfenced and fenced again. Of roof it had none--for you could hardly call the three or four tarpaulins, that lifted as the wind got under them and were kept down by stones, a roof. Parts of the walls were solidly constructed; other parts had been battened up with hedgestakes, filled in with sods and peats, stuffed up with coats, anything. It had an old door that had been used somewhere else, and appeared to be propped up with stones. Over one window-opening hung an old brown coat, the other frame was empty. A bright glow shone on the rubble within, and smoke and sparks came merrily from the chimney. The fire crackled loudly, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking bacon. All about the cavity in the sand lay stones big and little, timbers, stakes, loops of rope. There was a hand-cart too, with its handle making a T in the air. A sc.r.a.ping sound was heard, as of somebody cleaning out a pan, and then came a low "Wouf" and flare of fat in the chimney. Then somebody spoke.

"Squeeze t' barril, Tom, and see if there's another cup o' tea."

"Nay, we've supped t' lot."

"Blow down t' vent-hole...."

As if those walls vanished again even more quickly than they had sprung up, Llanyglo could see a picture vividly in its fancy--a picture of a tilted barrel, with the cheeks of one man distended over the spigot-hole while another caught a muddy trickle in a thick gla.s.s---- Then their vision fled, and they were staring at that unimaginable house again---- Slowly, and without a word, they moved off through the soft sand in the direction of the Baptist Chapel.

VI.

THE FOOT IN THE DOOR.

IT was a Sat.u.r.day, a day on which the school did not a.s.semble, and the door of the schoolhouse was locked. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd was sent off in haste for the key. They waited for him to come back, twenty of them, men and women, with others hurrying over the sandhills to join them. Eesaac Oliver ran panting up again, and they entered the schoolhouse. This was a large, yellow-washed room with beams making triangles overhead and hot-water pipes running round the walls below. A small squad of desks stood upright behind, and a number of smaller benches knelt, as it were, in front of them. These faced the raised desk of Miss Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress. A yellow chair or two, a couple of gla.s.s-fronted cupboards, a row of hooks for caps and cloaks at the back, and a harmonium, completed the furniture. A short covered way near Miss Pritchard's desk gave access to the adjoining Chapel. A door at the side of this led to the little stone outhouse where the water for the pipes both of school and Chapel was heated.

Their astonished exclamations had broken out now. As something legendary and dear and native to their land, it was in their hearts to defend the Hafod Unos; but for a stranger to set one up!

"Look you, it can-not be legal!" exclaimed Hugh Morgan, a little tubby man with semicircular brows and a round bald forehead. "It iss not even finiss; there iss holes in the walls so-a big I put my head through them! And that iss not a roof--it iss only rick-covers----"

"It is wonderful how they did it, whatever!" said little restless-eyed Mrs. Gruffydd. Those predatory eyes in Blodwen Gruffydd's pale face could see a sixpence a mile away, and, having seen it, would not leave it again until it had been safely dropped through the slot of the money-box into which the savings for Eesaac Oliver's education went. Eesaac Oliver was not to serve packets of tea and pennyworths of bicarbonate of soda over a grocer's counter. He was to go to Aberystwith College, and to become a preacher, and wear a black chip straw hat.

Howell Gruffydd, who had been as thunderstruck as the rest of them, now affected to take a jocular view of the matter.

"De-ar me, first Mr. Garden's house, and now Ty Kerr! Well, it make trade. Indeed, I need a bigger s'op presently--I think I start a Limited Company----"

But big consumptive John Pritchard spoke in deep tones. More vividly than any of them, John had seen, as if in a camera obscura, that vision of a Kerr blowing into the vent-hole of a barrel, while another Kerr anxiously watched the tap.--"We need a bigger public-house, I think," he said grimly.

"Indeed you are right, John Pritchard," Hugh Morgan struck eagerly in, the curves of his brows all marred with anxiety. "They sit in the Sta-tion Hotel Porth Neigr, and do noth-thing but drinking all day--it set a s'ock-king example, whatever."

"And they call it 'ano-ther cup of tea,'" said a third.

"They very smart ones----"

Again John Pritchard's deep voice came in.--"They're very deep ones."

Little Hugh Morgan spoke excitedly.

"Indeed you are right again, John Pritchard! John Williams Porth Neigr, he say to me it would not surprise him if that Ned Kerr speak Welss so well as n.o.body if he wiss!"

A shocked "Aw-w-w!" broke out. "And he say in the Court, 'No Welss!'"

"Tut-tut-tut--de-ar me!"

They were silent for a moment, contemplating this duplicity.

"And there iss four of them now," one resumed. "They send into England for two more."

"We soon have large population," said Howell Gruffydd again....

John Pritchard had sat down on one of the yellow chairs with his knees a yard apart. His brows seemed knitted.

"But there is noth-thing for them to do here," he said. "No work, no wages--only building fences."

"Perhaps they have lot of money. Their bacon smell very good, whatever."